AI & I: An Intellectual History of Artificial Intelligence

Translation from English, scientifically edited by Artem Smirnov. — Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2025. — 280 p.

ISBN 978-5-93255-700-6

This book is an intellectual history of the field of artificial intelligence, told from the perspective of one of its first practitioners, Eugene Chernyak. Cherniak entered the field in 1967 and participated in many events that shaped its future development. In this book, he traces the trajectory of the discipline's breakthroughs and disappointments to the present day, clearly and engagingly explaining the essence of a technology that is often either idolized or misunderstood. His main argument is controversial but well supported: that classical AI has been almost uniformly unsuccessful and that the modern deep learning approach should be viewed as the foundation on which all future breakthroughs will be built.

Written for the scientifically educated layperson, this book traces the history of the field of AI starting from its inception in 1956 at an academic seminar in Dartmouth University. The author covers topics such as logical reasoning and knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty, chess, computer vision, speech recognition, deep learning, and learning in a broad sense. Ultimately, Cherniac takes issue with alarmists who fear that AI will take away our jobs, creativity, and even destroy humanity, and explains why these fears are unfounded. He is convinced that we should boldly embrace this technology and use its full potential to benefit society.